Climate Letter #1313

A prize-winning author gives us his latest views on the battle against climate change.  Mark Lynas was the author of “Six Degrees: Our future on a hotter planet,” published in 2008 and used as the basis of a TV documentary that was widely watched.  He is a keen observer who always tells his story with great clarity.

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Along these same lines, The Guardian has collected a number of expert views of a planet in big trouble, for consideration at the international climate conference now getting underway in Poland.  “As recent reports have made clear, the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably staggered beyond a crucial point of no return.”  Many examples are provided.
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A new poll shows changes in the way Americans perceive climate change.  A majority of Republicans now at least agree that it is happening, and many more Democrats see it as a “very serious” matter, but there is still much lack of understanding about the cause.
–Opinion:  It should not take much in the way of science education to acquire a full grasp of the main cause of the climate change problem.  School kids are badly in need of access to that education and adults seem poorly motivated to do so on their own.  The education required to see why the problem is “very serious” is certainly more complicated, but not out of reach for any person of normal intelligence who is willing to make the effort.
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The problems surrounding the Great Lakes, especially Lake Erie, are highlighted in the new National Climate Assessment.  “It foresees more severe storms, more lake-effect snow and rain, expansion of invasive species that threaten local wildlife, larger “dead zones” in Lake Erie, and worsening of the algal blooms that can close beaches and threaten drinking water….. the impacts of climate change already are, and will continue to be, deep and widespread in our region.”  Extreme rain events of increasing frequency are singled out for their heavy damage.
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An assortment of climate impacts that get less attention than the more prominent ones (AP).  Some of these are of the very serious kind.
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The CO2 emissions released by California’s wildfires this year have been calculated, 68 million tons.  A substantial part of that can be attributed to the drying effects of climate change, which happened as well in many other parts of the globe.  For a comparison, human burning of fossil fuels, worth about 36 billion tons of CO2 emissions per year, comes out to be around 100 million tons per day, so big fires can really make a temporary difference in the total.
–This helps to explain the unusual spike in CO2 readings taken at Mauna Loa in the middle of last month.  That observatory is much of the time directly in the path of massive steady wind flows that move westward from the California coast toward Hawaii and would be enriched with the gas.  (Scroll down.)
Carl

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